Mike Riversdale

This is a true story, apparently. ... he mistook the North Star for the light of a friendly cabin and tried to ski into the sky. It is written up quite jovially but I'm sure it wasn't quite so jolly for Aimo Koivunen at the time. He regained consciousness some time later, finding himself in a hole of snow three feet deep, holding a smoldering ski pole in one hand and the door handle in the other. The explosions had blasted most of his clothes off and left him too injured to walk. He just about managed to start a small fire with the remains of the door and boiled some snow, but the situation was desperate.  And believe me, it's a story that just keeps on giving - don't stop at the wee history lesson towards the beginning, there's MUCH more to come after that! He finally wrote a short memoir in 1977, after a local magazine held a contest for soldiers to tell their stories. It took ... second place. Meet The Soldier Who (Accidentally) Had An Epic Drug Trip ... In The M

A week or so ago I posted a few videos under the collective title Is There Nothing That Is? , and here's another that not only pulls the rug away from things you (definitely I) thought but the also explains why not, which is always a nice way of doing it.

Watched a game, had some fun, took some photos. And now, 3 years later, I can also say, edited a photo.  Makes me happy .

Not a view I often see of the Sydney Opera House.

The Sydney CBD is know as "the city".  "What you doing after work?" "Just gonna have a quick drink in the city and then head home." But of course it's not pronounced that way, not by Sydney-siders, "the sea-dee" is the closest I can get in writing, and you need to say it quite slowly.

It got a bit cold so I bought a cheap Wallabies knock-off shirt, coz Karen couldn't believe I would wear such a thing, LOL

Today my son turns eighteen. I have no words. No words that can truly express my love for him, how proud I am of him, and how he is, still, such a big part of my life. Eighteen. It's such an arbitrary age, or so it seems, but I'm sure it's not. He steps over the boundary from boy to man, legally and societally. I have spent the last hour trying to find the perfect photo to share, the image that sums him up, what he means to me. No one photo can ever do that justice, so unfair to ask. I have been smiling, shedding a tear, reminiscing of the little boy I knew, who is no more. To my son, with the sparkle in his eyes, the big dreams, and the cheeky smile, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The best photos , to my mind, are either close and framed as buggery or as wide and sweeping as possible. Looking up (and out)  almost always provides the wide and sweeping.

Statue and commemorative park dedicated to Duke Kahanamoku who first demonstrated surfboard riding in 1914.

What do we actually know? We may not have any free will , there's no such thing as a fish , we don't know what a tree is , and heck we may all be just virtual anyway. So don't worry eh.

The security is strong at this place!

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welc